Monday, November 05, 2007

Well, it's now November 5. Monday morning. The Writers Guild is on strike; how is this going to impact the motion picture/television industry?

The last few weeks have brought about a number of "natural" disasters; i guess i'm including the wildfires in southern California in that designation. Just this weekend, there was the hurricane Noel, the remnants of which passed through the coast of New England and caused some flooding. But the previous course through the Caribbean caused over 60 deaths.

But the response of the Bush administration to the wildfires was very instructive: the minute Malibu was affected, whoosh, suddenly all sorts of help became available. In New Orleans: people are still waiting for any sign of assistance. But Malibu?

The whole state of the country is just too depressing to think about. All across the country, property values haven't just declined, they're dead. Of course, New York City (especially Manhattan) is exempt, for the simple reason that Manhattan is no longer owned by Americans. In the real estate section of the New York Times, the lead article is about how a majority of people now buying in Manhattan are foreign.

That is something that i've known for a while: here i am, not just a native New Yorker, but a native Lower Manhattanite, and not just that, but three generations in Lower Manhattan (my grandmother was born on Mott Street). And i've been driven out, outpriced.

And that's what the Bush administration has done. They've destroyed this country, and there's no way to build it back up. And i don't understand people in this country, why they're not angry about how the Bush administration has sold them out for bigger profits.

The one thing that was sacrosant in terms of the economics of this country was that real estate was always a good investment. In Hollywood, all the people who became really rich (such as Joel McCrea, Randolph Scott, Paulette Goddard) did so by buying up property. (In the case of Paulette Goddard: she was married while she was still a teenager appearing in the Ziegfield Follies; upon her divorce, her mother took the settlement money and started buying up property. They moved from NYC to LA, and there her mother really started to invest.) For the first time in the history of the US (if there was another time, let me know), land in the US is worthless. The buck has stopped here, and the buck is not worth anything.

The only land worth anything in the US now is that property which is owned by foreign investors, such as Manhattan.

I don't see why Bush and his administration haven't been pilloried for making Amerian land worthless. All throughout the US, people can't sell their homes.

Of course the stock market is going to react well to this: market values are not human values. And the more that foreign currency is worth, the more that multinational corporations are able to make in profits. And the United States is sliding into total bankruptcy and economic disaster.

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About Me

Daryl Chin is a multimedia artist, critic and curator. He was Associate Editor of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art from 1989 to 2005. He co-founded the Asian-American International Film Festival, was on the Board of Directors of NewFest (The New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival) and Apparatus Productions. With Larry Qualls, he created over 30 theater/performance pieces from 1975 to 1985.